Observing demos hurts learning, and confusion is a sign of understanding

Right, see also:

"Graesser, Person, and Magliano (1995) found that during one-on-one tutoring, when asking students "do you understand?", answering yes was not correlated with performance, while answering no was positively correlated with better performance." [Graesser, A. C., Person, N. K., & Magliano, J. P. (1995). Collaborative dialogue patterns in naturalistic one-on-one tutoring. Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 9, pp495-522.]

"twelfth grade science students all viewed the same physics demonstration by their teacher, but they all disagreed beforehand about what they expected to happen, and afterward disagreed about what they had seen and how to explain what they saw (Roth, McRobbie, Lucas, & Boutonné, 1997). [Roth, W.-M., McRobbie, C., Lucas, K. B., & Boutonné, S. (1997). Why do students fail to learn from demonstrations? A social practice perspective on learning in physics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34, 509-533. Retrieved from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/45493/abstract ]

And this summary presentation by Brian Pyper:

Best Practices in Physics Demonstrations Or Oh, I thought this was just for entertainment." https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Femp.byui.edu...

There's some really interesting data here, but I think one of the main conclusions they draw is wrong:

Confused students are far more likely to actually understand.

Looking at correct vs incorrect answers (almost 50/50 for 'confused' students), it seems like confused students are far more likely to guess.

Edit: I realize after posting this that it's important to know the test format to figure out whether students understood or were guessing. The article unfortunately doesn't say much about the test format.

Interesting research. However, before we try to generalize it to whole schooling system, here's another thing - demos make physics interesting, standard school teaching ways make physics boring as hell. The only reason I cared about it was that I watched too much Star Trek when I was a kid. Most of the people I know got bored by physics in school around age of 15.

Gee, I hope some high school teachers take this into account - especially the ones that mean well. One of my favorite teachers in high school extensively used physics demonstrations. The AP test scores were pretty high though, so maybe his other excellence balanced that out?

Still, the confusion thing is an interesting statistic to read.

Maybe this explains why I was always so confused in school!